


Volant Au Vent

by lily_winterwood



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Wings, Character Study, Gen, Kid Mycroft, Kid Sherlock, Wingfic, Winglock, Written for Johnlock Challenges Gift Exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-09
Updated: 2012-09-09
Packaged: 2017-11-13 21:07:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/507719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lily_winterwood/pseuds/lily_winterwood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From the instant he discovers the black feathers at six months, Sherlock Holmes knows that he is different. Gift fic for <a href="http://thatgingergirl16.tumblr.com/">thatgingergirl16</a> on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Volant Au Vent

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thatgingergirl16](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=thatgingergirl16).



> _Et dans la tourmente_  
>  Tes ailes triomphantes!  
> N'oublie pas de revenir  
> Vers moi.  
> -Cerf-volant ([x](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs5PUbXEa5s))

A child isn’t born with fully developed wings. Their plumage develops as they mature.

A newborn’s wings are feeble, membranous, folded against the body tightly like protection. With the exception of cleaning, doctors dare not touch such fragile limbs. For a majority of the first hundred days of life, the child is kept swaddled to promote wing development.

Down begins to grow within the first three months, soon followed by primary flight feathers. By the first year, the child’s wing-type is almost defined.

Usually, adults only mate with people who bear the same wing-type as them, as a means to carry on their specific trait. But sometimes, there are children whose wings are starkly different from those in the rest of the family. A genetic anomaly.

Sherlock Holmes is one of those.

* * *

From the instant he discovers the black feathers at six months, Sherlock knows that he is different. He can’t vocalise those findings just yet, but he knows. Really, everyone knows. Especially Mycroft, who stares at him more than necessary whenever they’re at mealtimes.

 Mycroft, his older brother with his majestic eagle owl wings. Mycroft, who looks so much like their father and will probably follow his footsteps into the government as well, stares at Sherlock as if he’s grown another head instead of black wings. Sherlock doesn’t like it; he starts to cry loudly and Mycroft immediately looks away, coughing uncomfortably. Through his tears, Sherlock looks down at his mush – he’s teething at this time, too – and decides that he doesn’t like it very much.

* * *

By the time he develops the ability to speak, his primary flight feathers have settled in and his pin feathers are unsheathed – and every last bit of it is black: inky black with a purple-blue-green shine in certain lighting. Iridescent, like his eyes. Sherlock would like to think they’re beautiful if his juvenile brain didn’t consider them also very, very odd.

Mostly because at this age, he is far too hung up on how different he is from the rest of the family. Everyone else in the Holmes family has eagle owl wings like Mycroft. Everyone. Even in old family photos.

Even the Vernets from his mother’s side don’t have wings like his. Theirs are pure white, possibly swan wings. Graceful and artistic, contrasting with the noble wisdom of the eagle owls. Sherlock sits cross-legged in front of the family album, trying to choke down a lump of something emotional in his throat and will away his tears.

His mother comes in. She, too, is an Owl-wing – most people, Sherlock has noticed, choose mates with their exact same wing-type in order to produce children of the same wing-type as well. He feels, more than ever, like he should’ve developed cuckoo wings. At least it would prove to him he doesn’t belong. After all, all the fairytales about adopted orphans say that they have cuckoo wings.

“Oh, Sherlock,” sighs his mother, eyes kind as she enfolds him in a hug. She’s obviously read him like a book, but then again he has nothing to hide. “Don’t let those funny ideas get into your head. You are my son and being a Raven-wing will not change that, ever.”

“How do you know?” Sherlock asks, eyes petulant. His mother laughs.

“Of course I know. I’m your mother.” She kisses him on the forehead. “And if you haven’t noticed, I’m unique like you as well. Of course I’d have to be, to marry your father.”

Sherlock sniffles and inhales his mother’s perfume. She smells nice, of sweet pea and clean linen and something so distinctively mother-like. Possibly what love would smell like, if it had a smell. Sherlock thinks it’s a bit interesting.

“Go on, run along now, sweetie,” Mother tells him, sending him out of the study. Sherlock does as he’s told, raven wings flapping as he races down the hallway.

* * *

Scientists have tried pinning down what causes differences in wing-type within families. Sometimes it’s because of a recessive gene, hidden from way back in the line. Sometimes it’s a mutation.

Sometimes, and oftentimes scientists don’t acknowledge this theory, it’s because the child is unique in some way.

* * *

But by the time Sherlock enters boarding school at six, he realises that not everyone will accept him for his wings like his mother does.

“Hey, Raven!” jeers a boy with kite wings as Sherlock enters the dormitories. “What kind of spell are you gonna cast on us today?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sherlock snaps in response, before he realises that his bed’s been short-sheeted. The other boys howl with laughter as a red-faced Sherlock sets about straightening his bedding.

Then there’d been the toad in his bureau, the dead insects in his food, the theft of his notebooks. Sherlock complains to his mother that he doesn’t like the school, and he’s promptly transferred to another where practically the same thing happens.

But at least this time he knows what’s in store.

“Ooh, I wouldn’t touch that. You might make it unlucky, Raven,” sneers a boy with rooster wings as Sherlock moves to pick up his violin.

“What’s it like, being a subject of severe inbreeding?” Sherlock demands, grabbing the violin and whirling around to face the boy. “Or are you just this stupid because you’re a cock by nature?”

For that comeback, he gets a whole day without troubles.

In the end, though, a small victory doesn’t matter. Sherlock slowly withdraws into himself, wings furling around him to shield him from the jeers of his classmates. He gives up complaining, too, only shouldering the abuse flung at him daily. He cultivates a stream of comebacks for certain moments, but on the whole he ignores everything. Retreats from the world to the shelter of his own feathers, where it’s always a sanctuary of night where no one can hurt him.

By the time he’s ten, Sherlock is a problem child.

* * *

“They’re only saying he displays antisocial tendencies because of his wings,” Mother tells Father, and Sherlock listens outside the door with a half-finished experiment in his hand, his small frame quivering.

In order to keep his mind on better things than his social status at school – one jibe away from anathema, perhaps – Sherlock has delved well and deeply into the sciences. Over the holidays from school he’s turned his bedroom into a laboratory and demolished a good portion of his belongings experimenting on them. He’s read practically every science-related book in the family library. He’s wrapped himself away in a world of his own in the pursuit of knowledge.

(The servants don’t appreciate his wrecking the house, though, and so Sherlock has contained most of the experimentation to his room on the conditions that none of them step into it without his permission.)

“Have you seen any of it firsthand?” asks his father, and Sherlock can imagine him, tall and auburn-haired, with his tawny wings unfurling in agitation, as if he’d like to fly away from his burdens, his problems.

“Not at all. I don’t like how quiet and withdrawn he’s gotten, though. The boys at school seem to mistreat him, but he’s never once complained about any of it.”

“Do you have proof of their bullying? You know we can’t shuttle him around from school to school; it’ll disrupt his learning.”

“I visited him the last Thursday before the summer holiday and he had a huge black-eye on his right eye,” replies his mother, and Sherlock thinks about her and her nice motherly smell and her soft wings, folded around him with her arms as well in a warm embrace. “I asked him about it and he said he got it while falling down the stairs.”

Sherlock hears his father sigh; he imagines him with his head in his hands. “Anastasie, children his age are always getting into some sort of trouble –”

“And the bruises all over the rest of his body?”

“Boys will be boys.”

“I can’t believe you’d side with those who’d torment your own son.”

“I want to move him, dear, but what good will it do?” his father’s voice is resigned. “It would only be the same, no matter what.”

“Is it a matter of disrupting Sherlock’s learning, or is it a matter of pride?” At his mother’s question, silence falls in the room, thick and suffocating even to Sherlock listening behind the door. “Pride can only take you so far, and Sherlock has none of that.”

Sherlock looks down at his experiment. The reaction he had been trying to observe has come and gone and he hadn’t noticed a thing. He sighs and turns to leave, but he catches his father’s answer just before he moves out of range.

 “He can learn to. You know how ravens are. Sherlock knows his problems, and I trust that someday, he will be able to solve it.”

It hasn’t struck Sherlock before, just how old his father could sound.

* * *

Ten is the age at which children learn to fly. Sherlock does so too.

Flying, he quickly realises, is one of the greatest things he could ever learn. Up in the air he feels like he’s escaping his troubles, and pretty soon it’s all he ever does to escape the torments at school.

Sherlock wonders what it’s like to fly until he can leave Earth behind, but after ascending too high one afternoon and realising that there’s not much oxygen up there, he decides that he really doesn’t want to know what lies beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.

The solitude of clouds, of the wind rippling through his hair and gliding gracefully over his wings – he lives for all of this. He lives for the adrenaline pulsing through him as he soars; for the feel of icy wind against his face, making his thoughts clearer and clearer; for the receding earth with its ant-like cars and patchwork fields and forests. He lives for flight, Sherlock realises, and revels in its freedom, revels in how the sky isn’t truly the limit, revels in everything it has to offer him – everything waiting for him to discover.

Even if he’s content with staying within Earth’s atmosphere, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to fly up and catch a star. When he lets himself think childishly, Sherlock thinks about that. He thinks about catching shooting stars or wishing stars or whatever stars he can find to give to his mother, to stick in her hair and along her feathers until she is more radiant and beautiful than the moon.

But flying is a thing of freedom, and Sherlock Holmes has never settled for anything less.

* * *

People look at Mother oddly whenever they’re out together, Sherlock knows, and he can’t help the pangs of shame. It’s clear that they’re family; he has her eyes and her curls, after all. But it’s also clear that they’re different wing types.

People talk. It’s all they ever do, and Sherlock hears them. The word ‘queer’ pops up, and Sherlock’s not sure what that means and his mother won’t say.

“You know what they say about Mother and Father,” Mycroft says the night before he sets off for university, and Sherlock looks up from his violin with an eyebrow quirked.

“What?” he asks.

“You haven’t heard?”

“If I have I’ve probably deleted it.” Sherlock’s pretty good at ignoring things he doesn’t want to hear.

“They think Mother had an affair.”

“They as in...”

“Everyone else.”

Sherlock frowns. “Is it because of me?”

Mycroft says nothing to that, which tells Sherlock so much more than anything he could have uttered.

* * *

By the time he’s thirteen, however, Sherlock is bound to society by an initial need to fit into the crowd, and starts dying his beautiful black wings.

Feather dye works wonders, somehow. They tint his wings dark brown, so that he might pass for some extremely dull-looking rock partridge or something. No one comments. After all, thirteen is the time when most children begin to discard their juvenile colourations for adult ones. All of the grey cygnets turn into full-fledged Swan-wings. Others assume that Sherlock actually isn’t a Raven-wing because of his feather dye, and start ignoring his mundane wings.

But after six months, Sherlock realises that the dye turns his feathers brittle, unhealthy, more prone to breakage. It’s after he’s painfully broken a couple of blood feathers that he realises that he’s being stupid.

He’s already spent seven years teaching himself not to care. Why should he suddenly care now?

Sherlock ditches the feather dye. Still by this time no one pays attention to him anymore, far too engrossed in their own changing bodies and wings. And somehow, that’s the way Sherlock likes it.

* * *

He notices things about people, common trends between their wing-types and their personalities. He notices how Sebastian Wilkes is every bit as pretentious as Peacock-wings get. He notices how Reginald Musgrave’s kite wings seem to affect how he flirts (that is to say, very loudly and enthusiastically, even to the point of chasing the other Kite-wing). He notices how Victor Trevor’s pigeon wings highlight his peaceful nature, his willingness to act as a go-between for others. Wings, he realise, highlight facets of people’s personalities. Therefore, a glance at someone’s wing-type ought to give a good estimate of their character.

In a way it makes sense. His family’s wings match with their dispositions, too. And Sherlock has always taken a small amount of pride in the raven’s intelligence level.

On this foundation, Sherlock begins observing people more as well, figuring out ways to deduce their occupations from their stride, their hands, their clothing, their accessories. This new deductive prowess, however, earns him no friends. It only proves to others that he’s a freak, trying to show off first by being so insufferably smart and now by reading people like books.

But by this point, Sherlock is so used to snide remarks (if he had a pence for every time he’s heard some crack about the word ‘nevermore’, he could’ve bought just about all of England) that he never leaves a conversation without having the last word.

* * *

The first time Sherlock fully dives into the world of forensic science, it’s because of the suspicious and mysterious death of Carl Powers, an Auk-wing who had very much enjoyed diving before his untimely death at a London competition.

Carl Powers had some sort of fit underwater. His shoes are nowhere to be found, and he’d been discovered with his wings seized in a halfway-open position, almost as if paralysed that way.

The Yard doesn’t listen to his suspicions, though, and chalk it up to a tragic accident. Sherlock calls it murder.

* * *

Adolescence is the time when courting and mate-choices begin. Some people, like the birds they share a wing-type with, aren’t monogamous, and within their wing-type it’s perfectly fine.

‘Within their wing-type’, of course, is the key term.

As far as Sherlock can tell most people only date within their wing-type. It’s like a speciation side effect, which in and of itself is ludicrous because everyone is still within the same species. Honestly, the wing-type is more like a breed.

But it’s a breed where everyone wants a purebred. Children born to ‘alaryqueer’ parents, or parents who’ve mated outside their wing-type, are unwanted children by the rest of society, possibly even more anathematic than Sherlock and his fellow Raven-wings (not that he’s met any). Dating outside the wing-type is just odd, almost frowned upon.

Still, at least they’re seeking mates, even if it’s not within their wing-type. Sherlock has no urge to court at all.

It’s odd, really. Ravens are supposed to court early and bond later on. But he has neither the inclination to court nor mate, and it disturbs him especially in sight of everyone else acting like lovebirds, especially during the spring. Heterosexual and homoalar. That’s the accepted course of things.

Of course, with Sherlock being so unaccepted otherwise, it really doesn’t matter anyway.

* * *

 “I think you’re very smart,” a girl with crow wings tells him one afternoon, after Sherlock lands back down from a flight (he’s also found that flying makes his thought process clearer; could be something about the way the wind rushes over his wings and the soft caress of thermals that only buoy him higher and higher into cerulean blue sky).

“What gives you that impression?” Sherlock asks, frowning. She smiles, inclines her head. Sherlock can tell she’s not stupid herself – she’s evidently a fledgling writer, an honours student, on the school newspaper at her private school down the street. But there’s something unsettling in her eyes, and she must have confused him for a Crow-wing.

“You’re like me,” she replies, stepping closer. Her teeth are far too covered in braces. Sherlock steps back. She advances.

“No, I’m not,” Sherlock growls. “Go away.”

The feathers of her wings shine greenish in the light. Carrion crow. Part of him rationalises her, points out that she would be a good mother, they technically have wing-types in the same genus, and really no one would notice –

But still, there’s no urge in him that responds to her. All he feels is alarm.

The Crow-wing sashays yet closer, danger flickering in her eyes like an open flame. It would have been safer if she’d chased him, really, but Sherlock knows that she won’t. Most females don’t chase males. Males chased males, in the struggle for a mate, the competition to show who could provide more to the gene pool.

And even as he thinks that, he realises that she’s far too close, she’s breathing his air, she’s brushing her hands along his wings, caressing the dark feathers. Sherlock swallows and tries to move back again, but he knows he can’t walk backwards forever – he’d collide with the trees at the edge of the playing fields.

“Kiss me,” dares the Crow-wing. Sherlock feels revulsion curl in his stomach; however, his vocal cords are paralysed by fear. All he can do is shake his head, and at that her fingers dig painfully into the feathers of his wing. He cries out, but she has already plucked one of his covert feathers and is taking off into the sky, daring him to chase her.

Sherlock rises into the air, but instead of following her he rushes home, wings flapping as if his life depends on it (it probably does) and only looks back when he flies in through the open window of his father’s study. Luckily for him, though, his father is not in the room to detain Sherlock with questions as the adolescent Raven-wing rushes into his room and ducks under the covers like a child, trembling.

His mother wrests the details from him later on, and that night he spends clasped to her bosom, breathing in her lovely perfume, memorising it for the days to come.

* * *

His last sanctuary gone, Sherlock avoids flying like the plague until he leaves for university.

At university, he is still every bit the pariah, even amongst the Raven-wings and Crow-wings he encounters. He shuts everyone out, wrapping himself in his wings and raising his mental defences. Sebastian Wilkes has followed him to university, and between the two of them a quiet sort of understanding passes through them not to discuss their past.

Sebastian, as pretentious and peacocky he can get, at least isn’t nasty about Sherlock to his face anymore. Yet understanding or not, Sherlock still doesn’t like or trust the condescension rolling off the Peacock-wing like waves. Sebastian spends his time infiltrating the ranks of the wealthy students, schmoozing up to the right people. It’s sickening.

Sherlock can only take so much of university before he drops out. There’s nothing in it for him.

* * *

Sherlock discovers cocaine at twenty-one. It’s as brilliant as flying.

For a moment it’s as if his world is crystal clear and he can see everything in his thought process. The colours are so bright, the textures so sharp, the tastes so evident. Light pulsates before him, and he wonders if flying while high will make for twice the trip.

(He’s nearly knocked out by a passing Goose-wing when he tries. He doesn’t try again for a long time.)

Sherlock starts wandering the streets on cocaine, deducing people around him. On one of those jaunts, he stumbles across a crime scene, presided over by a man with golden eagle wings that shine like the metal under London streetlights.

He solves the case within a minute (victim at the crime scene has been brutally stabbed to death by someone with a predatory wing-type, possibly a goshawk – after all, the victim has honey-buzzard wings). The Eagle-wing stares at him speculatively, and then within another minute Sherlock is arrested for possession of cocaine.

(The murderer, Sherlock later hears, is indeed a man with goshawk wings, and just as secretive and aggressive to boot.)

The Eagle-wing, whose name is Lestrade, offers Sherlock a job with the Met on a consultative basis as long as he cleans up from the cocaine, and Sherlock at that point is sober enough to consider it.

Doesn’t make withdrawal anything less than a nightmare, though.

* * *

It’s hard, in the moments between cases, not to go back to cocaine. Sherlock tries his best to resist the temptation.

Sherlock takes to flying instead, because the dopamine and endorphins released that way are much better and he’s far away from that creepy Crow-wing who had stolen one of his covert feathers ages ago.

That’s still a bright and vivid thing in his nightmares, when he has them. Sherlock wraps his wings tighter around him in those instances and tries to ignore the persistent calling of the seven-per-cent solution.

However, if he flies, he can’t smoke. Sherlock chafes at how restrictive flying can be on the rest of the body. No matter how much flying means to him, he still can’t stand how he has to keep the rest of him pristine in order to fly.

The cases themselves, though, are a new kind of drug as well as his bread and butter. The cases provide the intellectual stimulation he needs, and through them he’s managed to pull himself an entire lab at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The man who got him that lab, a Jay-wing named Mike Stamford, had gotten himself framed by a former student for stealing out of a bank at the Strand. Sherlock had cleared things up and ensured the arrest of the perpetrator, who had been a Vulture-wing.

Still, even with his status as the world’s only consulting detective, Sherlock can tell that most of the Met doesn’t trust him, partly because of his wings, and partly because no one in their opinion could possibly ever be that clever.

* * *

On one particular case, he finds himself taking the long and arduous flight to Florida in order to help convict a serial killer. A couple years later the man’s widow offers him a reduced rate on some rooms at Baker Street that she’s trying to let. Sherlock decides that he likes the flat enough, but he’d still need a flatmate to split the rent.

That, he tells Mike. And Mike, being the ever-helpful man he is, comes into the lab after lunch with another man, diminutive with cropped blond hair and dark blue eyes.

But what Sherlock immediately notices, though, are the man’s wings. Chestnut and speckled on the back, buff-coloured and striped on the front. He limps a bit when he walks and his left wing droops slightly, like one that has been recently broken and barely mended.

A Kestrel-wing. A small bird of prey, courageous and surprisingly powerful for their size.

“An old colleague of mine,” Mike announces with a grin. “John Watson.”

Sherlock Holmes looks up at John Watson again and walks over to borrow his mobile. A wealth of additional information surrounds the Kestrel-wing – obviously from a medical background, with recent military action abroad – but still, he’s a Kestrel-wing. Not as outcast as a Raven-wing, but still unusual, especially since most people tended to underestimate their size or mistake them for Kite-wings and Buzzard-wings.

He smiles at John Watson and looks into his eyes. “Afghanistan or Iraq?” he asks.

 


End file.
